Some Can Whistle (26 page)

“It was real boring,” she said. “Just a big flop. I wouldn’t even kiss my date when he took me home. He was real pissed.

“It was just a big flop,” she said again. “It was the one thing I really wanted, and then when I got it I hated it. Right after that I quit school and left home. I guess I figured out that I was never gonna be proper as long as I lived. I figured I might as well just quit dreaming and throw in with the criminals.”

Suddenly she threw her glass off the porch, then threw the vodka bottle after it and burst into tears, her face in her hands.

I waited a bit and scooted over toward her so I could put my arms around her. T.R. didn’t resist.

“That’s one trouble with life,” I said. “Frequently when you do get something you want a lot, then you find out it wasn’t worth wanting after all.”

She took her wet face out of her hands.

“Is that how you feel about the woman’s kitchen?” she asked.

“No, that’s another problem,” I said. “She was worth wanting, all right. The problem there is that I wouldn’t have been able to live in that kitchen, even if I’d got to try. I wouldn’t have been any good at it. It’s not a way I could live.”

T.R. watched me—she was sniffling, but her cry was over, basically.

“Why not?” she asked. “If she loved you and she wanted you to, why not?”

“I’m not sure I can answer that very clearly,” I said. There was a hard throb in my temples as my headache gained a few yards. “I’ve been thinking about it for twenty years and I don’t really have a good answer. I just doubt it would have worked out.

“I may just be a loner,” I added, after a bit.

T.R. snorted. “If that’s it, you’re in trouble,” she said. “You sure ain’t alone now. You’re looking at a crowded future unless you kick us all out.”

“I won’t be kicking you out,” I assured her.

I wasn’t alone now, and that was fine, but T.R.’s haunting desire to be proper enough to go to East Texas country club
dances set off troubling reactions; it jarred with the view of her life I had been imagining for so many years. In my imagination T.R.’s life had always been proper, and this was not merely the wishful thinking of a sadly neglectful parent. Neglectful though I certainly had been, I had never entirely lost track of the fact that I had a child in the world. Many regrets haunted me as I fumbled through life—regrets about women won, lost, or just missed; regrets about art that got botched or never made at all—but nothing had haunted me so constantly as the fact of my missing child; I had long ago hired a detective and instructed him to make a discreet investigation. The detective had filed a convincing and reassuring report; I still had it. The one thing that seemed unarguable from the report was that T.R.—in the report she’s called Rosemary—was enjoying an impeccably proper childhood. I had pictures of her on her bicycle, at about age nine; of the very normal-looking school she went to; of the proper two-story frame house where she lived; of her twirling a baton with other little girls on a well-kept lawn. From the report, it appeared clear that she was growing up as a member of the small-town East Texas gentry. The yard had huge trees in it and a picket fence around it. Any girl growing up in such a house in a small Texas town would automatically have been proper. She would have been quite welcome at country-club dances, would never have had to yearn for such a puny token of her acceptability.

But T.R.
had
yearned, yearned so much that she still couldn’t talk about it in a steady voice. Something was wrong, and my knowledge of it wasn’t likely to slow the advance of my migraine. A dark gap suddenly yawned between the life I had imagined T.R. having and the life she might actually have had.

I felt a tremendous need to close the gap at once.

“T.R., please don’t get mad if I ask you questions,” I said. She had settled back into my arms.

“You better ask them nice, then,” she said tiredly.

“How come you weren’t considered proper?” I asked.

“Why would I be?” she said. “I grew up with Big Pa and Big Ma.”

“But I thought your grandfather had a successful car dealership,” I said. “I thought your grandmother was the county clerk of the county you lived in. I was told that your mother worked in the bank.”

“What made you think so?” T.R. asked, surprised. “Momma never worked in any bank. Big Pa didn’t own no car dealership, either, unless you mean a
stolen
car dealership, and Big Ma wasn’t no county clerk. She worked in the courthouse for a while, but that was just so she could steal old documents and stuff. Big Ma was in jail half the time. Big Pa always worked it so she was the one who had to go to jail when they got caught, and Big Ma was so simpleminded she let him get away with it. They had her in jail four times for stuff Big Pa actually stole.”

“Is that true?” I asked, in shock. Inside me a long-held vision was collapsing, crumbling like an ill-built house at the first shaking of an earthquake.

The ill-built house, of course, was my belief that T.R. had had an irreproachably upper-middle-class American girlhood, complete with a proper house, respectable, hardworking grandparents, a normal school, and proms at the country club, at which she was by far the most popular girl.

“What made you think stuff like that?” she asked again.

“I wanted to be sure you were all right,” I said. “I hired a detective to come to Texas and find you. I didn’t have much money then, but I thought he was a competent detective. I still have the report. He took pictures of the house you lived in and the school you went to. It all looked pretty nice.”

“Show me,” T.R. said. “It sounds to me like you got took.”

Finding the file wasn’t easy—what I fancifully called my study was the least-used room in a house where most of the rooms were rarely entered, much less used. My professional life, such as it was, had been compressed into one large filing cabinet, almost all of it crammed with contracts from the “Al and Sal” years. On a bookshelf beside the cabinet I had the scripts of the one hundred ninety-eight episodes, all bound in modest morocco.

For a moment, looking through the masses of “Al and Sal”
contracts, some of them the size of a phone book, I felt panicky. Maybe I
didn’t
still have the detective’s report, in which case T.R. would think I’d been lying and had never tried to look for her at all.

Finally, in the bottom drawer, I found a few scraps from my own professional prehistory, years before “Al and Sal.” There were my Hanna-Barbera contracts, as well as contracts for the two or three novels I’d started but never finished. Among them was the report from the A-Triple-AAA Detective Agency, the first one, as it happened, in the Los Angeles phone book. I well remembered the detective, a neat, middle-aged Hispanic named Jose Guerra—his secretary, an aging white woman, not so neat, referred to him as Jose Cuervo.

Jose had borne no resemblance to the gumshoes of myth, the Sam Spades, Philip Marlowes, Lew Archers. Jose had been an accountant in the office of a prominent L.A. divorce lawyer; the lawyer had even handled one of Nema’s divorces, as I remembered. In fact, it was the lawyer who had referred me to Jose; at that time Jose dressed with all the sobriety of a submanagement-level accountant. At first I had some hesitation about sending a Hispanic to East Texas, but after a meeting or two I concluded that Jose Guerra really belonged to the nation of accountancy, not the nation of Mexico. It was all I could do to notice him even when I was sitting across the desk from him; he blended in so well that he was almost invisible.

I sent him to Texas, and a month later he filed a meticulous report, complete with Polaroids of house, school, little girls twirling batons, etc. Those Polaroids, so reassuring in their middle-Americanness, had formed my vision of T.R.’s childhood all these years. When I handed them to T.R., she immediately began to shake her head.

“That’s me with the baton,” she said. “I did have a baton. It wasn’t my bike, though, and that sure wasn’t our house. That was Annie Elgin’s house. We was best friends for a while—her daddy owned the bank. I went to lots of slumber parties in that house till I got a bad reputation and didn’t get asked no more. Annie’s folks weren’t so bad. They knew Big Pa and Big Ma
were crooks, but they let Annie have me over anyway, for a while.”

“You didn’t live in this house?” I asked, although she had just told me she hadn’t.

T.R. shook her head. “We lived two blocks from nigger town,” she said. “We were about as close to being niggers as you could get in Tyler, considering that we were white.”

She looked at me with some concern to see how I was taking this news, and then began to read the report. She didn’t hurry. I was beginning to feel horrible. I felt like apologizing over and over, although T.R. was reading the report calmly enough, occasionally stopping to take a thoughtful swallow of vodka. When she finished she closed the folder and handed it back to me.

“Isn’t any of it true?” I asked.

“It’s all true,” T.R. said. “It’s just a report on Annie Elgin’s life, not mine. Big Pa ain’t dumb—that’s why he’s never been in jail, despite being a crook his whole life. He always expected you to come looking for me. He told me how horrible you were a million times—how you took dope and didn’t believe in Jesus. He knows every cop and every little courthouse secretary in East Texas. He pays off cops—gives them free body work in one of them crooked body shops he works with. He gets them silly old women in the courthouse to believing he’s about ready to divorce Big Ma and run off with them. He probably knew that detective was in Tyler before the man even found a parking place. I bet he bribed him before he even got unpacked.”

“It never occurred to me,” I said. That was the humbling truth.

“Oh, well,” T.R. said, “I don’t see that it matters a whole lot now. Big Pa just fixed it so you thought I was living like Annie Elgin. He’s fooled smarter people than us, I guess.”

“I only saw the man once,” I said. “I never suspected he’d be that cagy.”

We sat in silence for a bit. T.R. didn’t seem either surprised or disturbed by the fraud we had just discovered.
I
was surprised and disturbed, though. I felt horrible.

“I haven’t been thinking about Annie Elgin lately,” T.R. said.
“She was a real good friend to me. It’s nice she got to have a good childhood. These pictures just reminded me of how nice she was.”

“What happened to her?”

“She was killed in a car wreck last year, with both her little boys,” T.R. said. “A truck just kinda drove over them—at least that’s what I was told. So don’t look so gloomy about that stupid detective. Annie had a nice childhood, and I didn’t, particularly, but I’m alive and my kids are perfect, and she and her kids are dead. That’s a lot sadder than what happened to us.”

“You’re right,” I said. “But I still hate it that I was such a fool.”

“Show me the presents,” T.R. said. “If you’ve really got the presents, then maybe you weren’t such a fool. Maybe you just didn’t know what else to do.”

That was certainly true—I hadn’t known what else to do. For the first year or two after T.R. was born, when I was back in Hollywood and at my lowest ebb, I often called Sally, hoping she’d have softened toward me. She hadn’t, though; at the sound of my voice she always immediately hung up. Then she began to get unlisted numbers. The first little presents I got T.R. were refused at the post office. I probably wouldn’t even have known where the two of them were, had not Sally continued to expect me to pay for her life. She got my address off the packages I sent, and soon bills would arrive, mostly for car repair. She seemed to be continually wrecking cars; I always scrounged up the money and paid the bills because it was a way of keeping some kind of track of Sally and my child. I suppose I nourished the hope that someday Sally would come back to me, bringing our daughter. She didn’t, but she sent the bills, and I was able to keep up with the two of them through several moves—Lake Charles to Lufkin, Lufkin to Sherman, Sherman to Tyler. Jose Guerra hadn’t been forced to start from scratch. I had always known where to send T.R.’s presents.

I took her to the closet where I kept them. From time to time I had been tempted to throw them away or give them to the children of friends. The thought of them, unopened and unseen
in their closet, more than forty of them now, seemed too weird, even for me. Its weirdness had become oppressive—sooner or later, I imagine, I
would
have just told Gladys to get rid of them, but fortunately that day didn’t come. T.R. had come instead.

Buying those presents on her birthday and at Christmas every year was a ritual I couldn’t let go of—it was the statement of my parenthood—though often I writhed inside when the saleswomen at the fancy toy stores I went to in Beverly Hills innocently asked me what my little girl liked. The worst part of buying the toys was having to deal with the salespersons’ questions—that and having the presents arrive back in the mail. I sent each of them off with hope—surely sooner or later Sally would let her keep one—and received them back with despair, but I went on buying them.

I think T.R. hadn’t really believed me—not until the moment when she stepped into the closet where the presents were. She was fairly drunk, but I think it wasn’t vodka that caused her hands to tremble when she lifted the first present off the shelf. Except for the ten-speed bike, all the presents were still in their original gift wraps—some of which now looked as if they belonged in a museum of gift wrapping.

She looked at me, a kind of fright in her eyes.

“I never really thought this would happen, Daddy,” she said. “I’m shaking like a fuckin’ leaf. What am I supposed to do?”

“You’re supposed to open your presents,” I said. “Let me get you a chair.”

I got two chairs—fortunately it was a large walk-in closet. I sat in one, T.R. in the other, and we had a combined birthday party and Christmas morning, deferred for twenty-two years. As the fetus recapitulates the history of the species, T.R. and I recapitulated her own history and mine, a history that had floated unborn in both our consciousnesses until that hour. We progressed from stuffed animals—raccoons, possums, a giant koala that filled half the closet, to Barbie dolls and dollhouses, doll dishes, toy phones, radios, makeup kits, a rabbit-fur coat suitable for a ten-year-old; we went from preteen to teen to young woman, as represented in the styles of the times: tote bags,
Walkmen, leather jackets, necklaces, bracelets, watches, ending with garments of the sort my girlfriends sent Gladys from the most advanced boutiques in the world.